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Decius comments on By Which It May Be Judged - LessWrong
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Comments (934)
Suppose that the writer of the book isn't moral. What would the text of the book say about the morality of the writer?
Or we could assume that the writer of the book takes only moral actions, and from there try to construct which actions are moral. Clearly, one possibility is that it is moral to blatantly lie when writing the book, and that the genocide, torture, and mass murder didn't happen. That brings us back to the beginning again.
The other possibility is too horrible for me to contemplate: That torture and murder are objectively the most moral things to do in noncontrived circumstances.
Taboo "contrived".
"The kind of obscure technical exceptions that wedrifid will immediately think of the moment someone goes and makes a fully general claim about something that is almost true but requires qualifiers or gentler language."
That's not helpful, especially in context.
Apart from implying different subjective preferences to mine when it comes to conversation this claim is actually objectively false as a description of reality.
The 'taboo!' demand in this context was itself a borderline (in as much as it isn't actually the salient feature that needs elaboration or challenge and the meaning should be plain to most non disingenuous readers). But assuming there was any doubt at all about what 'contrived' meant in the first place my response would, in fact, help make it clear through illustration what kind of thing 'contrived' was being used to represent (which was basically the literal meaning of the word).
Your response indicates that the "Taboo contrived!" move may have had some specific rhetorical intent that you don't want disrupted. If so, by all means state it. (I am likely to have more sympathy for whatever your actual rejection of decius's comment is than for your complaint here.)
Decius considered the possibility that
In order to address this possibility, I need to know what Decius considers "contrived" and not just what the central example of a contrived circumstance is. In any case, part of my point was to force Decius to think more clearly about under what circumstances are torture and killing justified rather than simply throwing all the examples he knows in the box labeled "contrived".
However Decius answers, he probably violates the local don't-discuss-politics norm. By contrast, your coyness makes it appear that you haven't done so.
In short, it appears to me that you already know Decius' position well enough to continue the discussion if you wanted to. Your invocation of the taboo-your-words convention appears like it isn't your true rejection.
That doesn't help if wedrifid won't think of as obscure and noncentral exceptions with certain questions as with others.
(IIRC, EY in his matching questions on OKCupid when asked whether someone is ever obliged to sex, he picked No and commented something like ‘unless I agreed to have sex with you for money, and already took the money’, but when asked whether someone should ever use a nuclear weapon (or something like that), he picked Yes and commented with a way more improbable example than that.)
I'd take “contrived circumstances” to mean ‘circumstances so rare that the supermajority of people alive have never found themselves in one of them’.
No. But I will specify the definition from Merriam-Webster and elaborate slightly:
Contrive: To bring about with difficulty.
Noncontrived circumstances are any circumstances that are not difficult to encounter.
For example, the credible threat of a gigantic number of people being tortured to death if I don't torture one person to death is a contrived circumstance. 0% of exemplified situations requiring moral judgement are contrived.
Taboo "difficult".
Torture and murder are not the most moral things to do in 1.00000 00000 00000*10^2% of exemplified situations which require moral judgement.
Are you going to taboo "torture" and "murder" now?
Well, that's clearly false. Your chances of having to kill a member of the secret police of an oppressive state are much more than 1/10^16, to say nothing of less clear cut examples.
Do the actions of the secret police of an oppressive state constitute consent to violent methods? If so, they cannot be murdered in the moral sense, because they are combatants. If not, then it is immoral to kill them, even to prevent third parties from executing immoral acts.
You don't get much less clear cut than asking questions about whether killing a combatant constitutes murder.
Well, if you define “murder” as ‘killing someone you shouldn't’ then you should never murder anyone -- but that'd be a tautology and the interesting question would be how often killing someone would not be murder.
"Murder" is roughly shorthand for "intentional nonconsensual interaction which results in the intended outcome of the death of a sentient."
If the secret police break down my door, nothing done to them is nonconsensual.
Any half-way competent secret police wouldn't need to.
You seem to have a very non-standard definition of "nonconsensual".
Decius, you may also be interested in the closely related post Ethical Inhibitions. It describes actions like, say, blatant murder, that could in principle (ie. in contrived circumstances) be actually the consequentialist right thing to do but that nevertheless you would never do anyway as a human since you are more likely to be biased and self-deceiving than to be correctly deciding murdering was right.
Correctly deciding that 2+2=3 is equally as likely as correctly deciding murdering was right.
Ok, you're just wrong about that.
Murder is unlawful killing. If you are a citizen of the country you are within it's laws. If the oppressive country has a law against killing members of the secret police than it's murder.
Murder (law) and murder (moral) are two different things; I was exclusively referring to murder (moral).
I will clarify: There can be cases where murder (law) is either not immoral or morally required. There are also cases where an act which is murder (moral) is not illegal.
My original point is that many of the actions of Jehovah constitute murder (moral).
What's your definition of murder (moral)?
This may be the word for which I run into definitional disputes most often. I'm glad you summed it up so well.
I'm pretty sure they would say no, if asked. Just like, y'know, a non-secret policeman (the line is blurry.)
Well, if I was wondering if a uniformed soldier was a combatant, I wouldn't ask them. Why would I ask the secret police if they are active participants in violence?
So cop-killing doesn't count as murder?
You said "consent". That usually means "permission". It's a nonstandard usage of the word, is all. But the point about the boundary between a cop and a soldier is actually a criticism, if not a huge one.
A singleminded agent with my resources could place people in such a situation. I'm guessing the same is true of you. Kidnapping isn't hard, especially if you aren't too worried about eventually being caught, and murder is easy as long as the victim can't resist. "Difficult" is usually defined with regards to the speaker, and most people could arrange such a sadistic choice if they really wanted. They might be caught, but that's not really the point.
If you mean that the odds of such a thing actually happening to you are low, "difficult" was probably the wrong choice of words; it certainly confused me. If I was uncertain what you meant by "torture" or "murder" I would certainly ask you for a definition, incidentally.
(Also, refusal to taboo words is considered logically rude 'round these parts. Just FYI.)
Consider the contrived situation usually used to show that consequentialism is flawed: There are ten patients in a hospital, all suffering from failure of a different organ they will die in a short time unless treated with an organ transplant, and if they receive a transplant then they will live a standard quality life. There is a healthy person who is a compatible match for all of those patients. He will live one standard quality life if left alone. Is it moral to refuse to forcibly and fatally harvest his organs to provide them to the larger number of patients?
If I say that ten people dying is not a worse outcome than one person being killed by my hand, do you still think you can place someone with my values in a situation where they would believe that torture or murder is moral? Do you believe that consequentialism is objectively the accurate moral system?
Considering that dilemma becomes a lot easier if, say, I'm diverting a train through the one and away from the ten, I'm guessing there are other taboos there than just murder. Bodily integrity, perhaps? There IS something squicky about the notion of having surgery performed on you without you consent.
Anyway, I was under the impression that you admitted that the correct reaction to a "sadistic choice" (kill him or I'll kill ten others) was murder; you merely claimed this was "difficult to encounter" and thus less worrying than the prospect that murder might be moral in day-to-day life. Which I agree with, I think.
I think diverting the train is a much more complicated situation that hinges on factors normally omitted in the description and considered irrelevant by most. It could go any of three ways, depending on factors irrelevant to the number of deaths. (In many cases the murderous action has already been taken, and the decision is whether one or ten people are murdered by the murderer, and the action or inaction is taken with only the decider, the train, and the murderer as participants)
Let's stipulate two scenarios, one in which the quandary is the result of a supervillain and one in which it was sheer bad luck.